Daily Archives: August 11, 2012

“Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the two men who will destroy our people…PLEASE RETWEET,” linking to an article he wrote on Global Grind.

He described the Romney-Ryan ticket in the article:

…Mitt Romney has made his campaign slogan loud and clear: EVERYTHING’S FOR SALE! And all of the money that is made on everything that is sold will be made on the backs of the poor and the working class. Take away social security, take away healthcare, privatize education, cut food assistance programs, outsource another war, eliminate services for women and then hide your money in off-shore accounts so we never know how much you made!

A thick two-foot square of Styrofoam began to work its way from what now appeared to be a brickwork entrance in whatever was below. As the top was tossed away, a haggard man in a charcoal colored dishdasha [robe-like garment] began to move. Lights and muzzles bore down the man, illuminating him inside the darkness. Seeing no immediate weapon, the SOF (Special Operations Forces) men kept the flash-gang grenade at bay.

“Samir,” a soldier shouted, calling out to an Iraqi-American refugee working with the special ops team, “come and talk to him. Tell him to come out before he gets killed.”

“Who are you?” demanded the soldiers through the translator.

“I am Saddam Hussein, the duly elected president of Iraq,” the startled man replied. “I am willing to negotiate.”

“Well, President Bush sends his regards,” answered one of the men.

Those are the words of retired Lt. Col. Steve Russell – also known as state Sen. Steve Russell, R-Okla., – the man whom many consider one of the masterminds of the capture of Saddam Hussein.

He was elected to the Oklahoma state senate in 2008, running on a platform of “support for veterans, 2nd Amendment rights, adoption reform, and reducing the tax burden on working Oklahomans.”

Is a gun like a virus, tobacco or alcohol? According to “public health experts,“ who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a ”social disease,” it is.

What we need, they say, is a “public health approach” to the problem.

Dr. Garen Wintemute of University of California, Davis claims it is no longer enough to tackle gun violence by focusing solely on the people doing the shooting. Dr. Stephen Hargarten, who treated victims of the Sikh temple shootings at the emergency department he heads in Milwaukee, feels the same way.

“What I’m struggling with is, is this the new social norm?” he asked, before asserting: “This is what we’re going to have to live with if we have more personal access to firearms.”

He continued: “We have a public health issue to discuss. Do we wait for the next outbreak or is there something we can do to prevent it?”

About 260 million to 300 million firearms are owned by civilians in the United States; about one-third of American homes have one. Last year, 55 percent of Americans said gun laws should either remain the same or become more lenient.

Hoping? President Barack Obama’s team has apparently been waiting for a Paul Ryan vice presidential pick.

The president’s campaign wasted no time labeling the Wisconsin congressman as “severely conservative” calling his budget proposal “a sham” and blaming his economics for “crash[ing] our economy.” The attacks came from a website launched while Ryan was giving his speech in Norfolk, Va. accepting the position of Mitt Romney’s running mate. The website houses a full-on coordinated multimedia attack framing the Romney Ryan ticket as The Go Back Team. The site is fully equipped to trash Ryan, Romney and their collective record.

Every public school in America is about to receive a wake-up call that will eliminate any excuse for stomping on students’ and teachers’ religious liberty.

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that neither students nor teachers “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” activists of various stripes – most recently from atheist and homosexual groups – have tried to find ways around the ruling, to squash free speech, and religious speech in particular, in America’s public schools.

Last year, for example, Florida teacher Jerry Buell at Mount Dora High School faced suspension after the homosexual advocacy group Equality Florida demanded he be disciplined for voicing disapproval of same-sex marriage on Facebook.

Though Buell used his personal computer, on his personal time to post his opinion on his personal Facebook page, he lost three days in the classroom to suspension before the Lake County School Board realized its mistake and decided to exonerate and reinstate the teacher.

Just this month, Missouri State Rep. Mike McGhee explained to the Missourian that the state’s newly passed “right to pray” constitutional amendment was needed because he heard about children who were asked not to pray after getting a school lunch, a girl being told not to take her Bible to study hall and a parent explaining how an adult at her child’s school told her son to change the words in the song “Jesus Loves Me” to “My Mom Loves Me” while he was on the school playground.

Though voters passed the “right to pray” amendment by a roughly 5-to-1 margin, standing against it was the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

No one at Los Angeles International Airport was chanting “the beautiful people, the beautiful people” on Friday when they got a look at a strange apparition standing in the security line: a tall, pale man wearing mirrored sunglasses, a black hat and raincoat, with the words “FUCK YOU” written across his mouth and neck in black ink.

That man was Brian Hugh Warner, better known as Marilyn Manson.

Should you require further explanation — and you should — a witness who stood in the same line offered one, via the social news website Reddit.

“I just went through the LAX security line with Marilyn Manson,” the witness, who goes by the handle j_patrick_12, writes. “He had ‘FUCK’ scrawled in large letters across the bottom half of his face, with what appeared to be a grease pencil.”

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney brought his newly minted running mate to Ashland this afternoon, telling a crowd at Randolph-Macon College that he and Paul Ryan will get the economy running again.

Romney, who called Ryan a leader of character and vision, said he and his running mate will “do everything in our power to get America on the right track again.”

Romney said President Barack Obama ran on a slogan of “change” in 2008, but is “changing us into something we don’t recognize.”

In his remarks Romney also paid tribute to Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, his Virginia campaign chairman, who is fighting Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli for the 2013 Republican nomination for governor.

Romney called Bolling “a great friend and, I hope, the next governor of Virginia.”

Ryan, who introduced Romney, said the economic recovery is “the worst we’ve seen in 70 years” and that nearly one out of six Americans lives in poverty.

“It doesn’t have to be this way. We can turn this thing around. We can get this right,” Ryan said. “You know how we do that? We elect a leader.”